Jump to content

Video Games - Sequels of Dread and Anticipation


Toth

Recommended Posts

3 hours ago, Toth said:

Okay, I have obviously no clue whatsoever how to use a fallback line. I declared war on Columbia. Columbia immediately attacked and I was loosing the battle on every single front line, just as expected. Beforehand I drew a fallback-line, so I... think I ordered them to go back to it? But it turned out I think that was only a move order. So they bunched up all in one place while the Columbians freely advanced everywhere else, which dissolved the fallback-line. I then frantically ordered ordered my army to "defend province". Which... was somehow understood as walking to the south-east edge of the amazonas territory, as far away from the enemy as possible, and... sit there. And then when the Columbians continued their advance, my army... attacked with one division at a time, watching them get massacred one by one.

Okay, the hell?!?

You hit the little arrow in the upper right of the army?

That’s how you activate orders. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was lukewarm on Baldur's Gate III until they introduced the Druid class and confirmed you can play 90% or more of the game as a giant badger. Now will be keeping a closer eye on it (you can also turn into a polar bear, but frankly the badger is where it is at).

On 2/26/2021 at 12:40 PM, Rhom said:

Ya’ll are over here detailing heavy strategy in world conquest... meanwhile, I discovered Risk in the Nintendo store for the Switch.  Anyone wanna hear the story of the time I traded in 8 cards for 30 armies and managed to retake the entire world when all I had left was Japan?

:lol: 

Ha. The next Axis and Allies video game - which massively streamlines this stuff - is pretty good as well, and I've always respected how it nailed the economic/military balance of WWII in a mind-bogglingly simple way. I spent some time with Hearts of Iron and respected what it was trying to do, but the "it'll take 200 hours of not knowing WTF is going on before you start to understand the game's systems" attitude got a bit grating after a while.

The Steel Division series was great for having a lot more complexity than your standard strategy game whilst also being very playable and it being relatively quick to get to grips with, and the level of detail you wanted to engage in was extremely scalable, so on some missions you can command individual companies and on others you're guiding entire divisions advancing along a 100-mile front. All of the maps being based on the actual WWII aerial photography was also amazing (modern games tend to be based on modern satellite data, sometimes where the rivers have changed courses dramatically and with features that didn't exist back then).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Toth said:

I was under the impression that would only fire my attack order. How can I know which order it is they would do?

You may be right. Let me check real quick. 
 

Edit: Yep. You’re right. Unlike attacks, naval landings, and airborne assaults, fallbacks aren’t activated by the arrow. 
 

You just need to CTRL left click on the fall back line you want them to go to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The "definitive edition" of Age of Empires II I have to say is far, far better than the one for the original game. The original was bugged to fuckery - nothing like taking 30 men to attack an enemy town only for 10 of them to suddenly merge into a gibbering mass of limbs that can't do anything other than die - but AoE2 is much more stable, and genuinely improves over the original game with better QOL, AI and UI improvements whilst keeping the core gameplay intact.

I wonder if they could port the AoE1 campaigns into the AoE2 engine, that'd improve things a lot (AoE1 has a whole bunch of bullshit issues in the base game as well, like no way of assigning unit formations). The definitive edition also has a bonkers amount of content. It has the original campaign, The Conquerors expansion and the three expansions from the previous HD edition of the game (The Forgotten EmpiresThe African Kingdoms and Rise of the Rajas), plus a brand new expansion, The Last Khans. That's 24 campaigns altogether, totalling 136 single-player missions spread over 35 civilisations. The later expansions go wild, with maps four times larger than the very largest maps from the original game and a unit cap of 500 (the base unit cap in the original game was 200). That's not even scraping the hundreds upon hundreds of maps for skirmish and multiplayer. 

There's also a paid new expansion which was just released, Lord of the West, which must be some kind of record for new paid material being released for an existing game (22 years), which adds 3 new campaigns, 16 missions and 2 new civilisations. Bonkers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What I massively disliked in the bits of the "newer" expansions I tried (mostly from Forgotten Empires, I think) was that they were way too scripted: you had to go to place X with a more or less fixed amount of troops, you had to do some specific actions before being able to access another part of the map. I never found a glorious map where you basically had a starting base, should build it and have proper defenses, and had direct access to the whole map like you were in a multiplayer game, and like you had in the bulk of the original AOE2 campaigns.

Does this still happen, and which campaign should I try, that would come close to what AOE2 actually was?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

You may be right. Let me check real quick. 
 

Edit: Yep. You’re right. Unlike attacks, naval landings, and airborne assaults, fallbacks aren’t activated by the arrow. 
 

You just need to CTRL left click on the fall back line you want them to go to.

Thanks! This indeed worked...

... though maybe a bit too well. I pulled my units behind the Amazonas, giving Columbia the land in between and then... they really just stand there, not daring to go for any push despite having a 8:1 numerical advantage. It's downright silly.

Also, just as I expected, my planes are useless. I had all my fighters in the air and yet within seconds my infrastructure was bombed from 7 to 0. Fuck...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

What I massively disliked in the bits of the "newer" expansions I tried (mostly from Forgotten Empires, I think) was that they were way too scripted: you had to go to place X with a more or less fixed amount of troops, you had to do some specific actions before being able to access another part of the map. I never found a glorious map where you basically had a starting base, should build it and have proper defenses, and had direct access to the whole map like you were in a multiplayer game, and like you had in the bulk of the original AOE2 campaigns.

Does this still happen, and which campaign should I try, that would come close to what AOE2 actually was?

I'm still knee-deep in the original and Conquerors campaigns (I've completed the Scottish and Frankish campaigns, done half the Mongol campaigns but hit a massive difficulty spike and am now on the last Saracen mission) so no idea at this point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've tried to get into the definitive edition of AoE2 a few times, since I love the original version. But I've had to come to grips with the fact that I'm simply beyond terrible at RTS games now. I'm too methodical in how I play games, and RTS' stress me out like nothing else. I don't know how or when this change happened to me, but it did.

 

In my playing, I dropped Torment: ToN, it just felt like a ton of text that was going nowhere and I didn't care about anything in it. Instead, I decided to give Wasteland 3 another shot, a game I also bounced off of for some reason when it released. I'm having fun so far, but I restarted and I'm not up to where I dropped it to the first time yet; so we'll see.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Fez said:

I've tried to get into the definitive edition of AoE2 a few times, since I love the original version. But I've had to come to grips with the fact that I'm simply beyond terrible at RTS games now. I'm too methodical in how I play games, and RTS' stress me out like nothing else. I don't know how or when this change happened to me, but it did.

 

Age has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated yooooooouuuu!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Been playing GoW (and some MLB TheShow -- getting excited for the season).

I have been getting my ass absolutely kicked. I've been playing on "Give Me A Challenge" -- which might have been a mistake. Thankfully, restarting after dying is very quick ... but goddamn, you can take about 3-4 hits and even less than that if it's a boss. I may need to crank back to normal and/or play while more sober. :p

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Toth said:

Thanks! This indeed worked...

... though maybe a bit too well. I pulled my units behind the Amazonas, giving Columbia the land in between and then... they really just stand there, not daring to go for any push despite having a 8:1 numerical advantage. It's downright silly.

Also, just as I expected, my planes are useless. I had all my fighters in the air and yet within seconds my infrastructure was bombed from 7 to 0. Fuck...

Just to be sure. You are selecting the mission after assigning your aircraft to an area? Air superiority or interception?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Just to be sure. You are selecting the mission after assigning your aircraft to an area? Air superiority or interception?

Yes. It's just at a mission efficiency of around... 12%?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We have climbed to the top of the mountain in Valheim.  Both literally, in the case of finding and defeating Moder, the game's dragon boss who resides in the frozen peaks of the game's mountain biome, and figuratively in that we've finished the game's current final boss. 

Honestly, the final two bosses in this game were pushovers.  I never even went below 75% health against the game's final boss, and with a fire resistance potion activated, you really neuter his ability to bleed you with damage over time.  He still hit pretty hard when we got into melee range, which was basically necessary since arrows didn't appear to do a ton of damage to him, whereas my Mjolnir-esque hammer that deals frost damage was very effective.  But overall, it took us less than five minutes and no one was ever in any serious danger.

The same was pretty much true for the aforementioned Moder, the dragon boss.  He essentially had two phases.  One where he'd fly around and rain ice attacks on you and one where he'd land and do both ice and melee attacks.  The fight pretty simply boiled down to dodging his airborne attacks and then lighting his ass up whenever he landed.  It took all of three or four minutes to bring him down.

The third boss was probably the toughest.  We knew to bring poison resistance potions with us, which like with the final boss neutralized his capability to deal damage over time, but he was such a fucking damage sponge that it took us nearly twenty minutes to kill him.  We did have one person AFK on the server, and bosses scale to the player count, so we had to fight him with four times his single-player health with only three players.  He also constantly spawns skeletons that have to be dealt with, and this was back when those were actually threatening to us.

Now to the real end game of Valheim...building cool shit and sailing around exploring the world map while we wait for the last few biomes to be populated in updates.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Fez said:

I've tried to get into the definitive edition of AoE2 a few times, since I love the original version. But I've had to come to grips with the fact that I'm simply beyond terrible at RTS games now. I'm too methodical in how I play games, and RTS' stress me out like nothing else. I don't know how or when this change happened to me, but it did.

I was encountering a bit of this so hit on the idea of turning it into Baldur's Gate: I remapped pause to space and played it as a real-time with pause game (you can still give orders to units whilst the game is paused). This makes the start of each mission, where it's often crucial to get an economy up and running ASAP, a bit easier.

I was also struggling a bit until I remembered that the most important building in AoE2 is the Market, which allows you to swap resources, so it means you can heavily invest in one or two resources (usually food and wood to start with) and still be able to pick up the others (gold and stone) through exchanges. Although that only works for a while until you flood the market and food and wood become almost worthless.

It's still something of an awkward game to get to grips with, mainly because your military is so shockingly shit until you get high-tier units or maximum upgrades (archers, who are crap at the start, abruptly turn into arbalasters, who are unstoppable killing machines when given the "always hit their target" and fire arrow upgrades), which makes economic development really important, which is great but eats into your military prep time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...